America's nightcap

The lure of Nebraskan wit and loud jackets

“HEEEEEERE'S Johnny”, went Ed McMahon's ridiculously exaggerated intro—and Johnny Carson, with his checked sports jackets and garish ties, would step through the curtain, give a wry grin to the cameras and proceed to entertain the nation with a late-night menu of deadpan jokes, Hollywood guests and musicians. From 1962, when he inherited NBC's “Tonight Show” from Jack Paar, until 1992, Mr Carson defined late-night television, and, in part, American culture. As Bob Hope once said: “He changed people's sleeping habits, sex habits and their midnight eating habits.”

Doubtless that is why when Mr Carson—of his own volition—at last retired, more than 50m Americans tuned in for the final show. This week, when he died from emphysema at the age of 79, the tributes were uniformly generous, whether from George Bush or Bette Midler or the New York Times.

One justification for the nostalgic acclaim is that Mr Carson was, indeed, a master of his craft. With a nice touch in self-deprecation, he could rescue himself from a joke that had bombed. He could put the nervous at ease, and puncture the pompous. He could spot talent for his show and not be afraid to let it outshine the host: Jay Leno (his successor on the “Tonight Show”), Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld and Ellen DeGeneres all owed much to him. Best of all, his Nebraskan, middle-America persona gave him licence to launch well-aimed political barbs (“You get the feeling that Dan Quayle's golf bag doesn't have a full set of irons.”).

But another reason for the nostalgia is the recognition that the Carson era of television has gone for good. Each weekday night, from the 1960s through the 1980s, up to 15m Americans would stay up to watch him. An extraordinary 45m viewers, a fifth of the population, watched the 1969 show in which the falsetto-voiced Tiny Tim married Vicki Budinger, a 17-year-old singer.

These days, Mr Leno's “Tonight Show” attracts an average audience of around 6.2m. This is no reflection on Mr Leno, by some way the most popular late-night TV host, but merely the result of the competition the traditional networks now face from cable channels and the internet.

On the other hand, not all of the Carson era belongs to the past. It was Mr Carson who in 1972 moved the “Tonight Show” from New York to “beautiful downtown Burbank”, hence establishing Los Angeles, rather than New York, as the capital of popular culture. It was Mr Carson who cut the length of the “Tonight Show” down from 90 minutes to 60, allowing space for the late-late shows that now follow Mr Leno and his competitors. And it was Mr Carson who took full ownership of his show and its video-cassette and other spin-offs—a formula that has helped make Oprah Winfrey and many other TV hosts extraordinarily rich.